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Is There A Way Out?! September 27, 2017 " # 0 Comments $ Capitalism, Climate

Change, Colonialism, Development, Environment, Innovation, Nature, New

Economy, Policy, Politics, Power Dynamic, Society

Ashish Kothari and Pallav Das

One doesn’t need exceptional socio-political acumen torecognize that the contemporary world is in a state of toxicferment. The dystopian future of environmental andeconomic collapse that we’ve seen advancing menacingly forlong seems to be pushing fiercely on the door, now, ready toknock it down. 2017 has been a year of dire confirmations ofthe scary and scandalous trends that have emerged over thelast few decades of rampant neoliberalism, firmly pointing ustowards potential catastrophes that the earth is ill preparedto face. In a somber report published in July, 2017, the GlobalFootprint Network, which measures the amount of resourcesbeing used internationally so as to keep an eye on theecological footprint of various human activities and theoverall biocapacity of the earth, declared that human beings

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will have used the annual allowance of their planetaryresources such as water, soil, forests, and clean air by the 2of August. This means that the world will be living in creditfor the rest of the year. In fact, the report says that at currentconsumption rates, the equivalent of 1.7 planets would berequired to produce enough to meet the demands ofmodern living.

On the economic side, too, the current picture is as stark,and marked by utterly dismal levels of inequality. In the twocountries that we can talk about with some knowledge,namely the United States and India, worrying trends arevisible. The Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C.informs us that in the United States, the top tenth of theupper one percent now has as much net worth as thebottom 90%. Moreover, of the total income growth since the2008-09 recession, more than 85% has disappeared into thepockets of the top 1%. Similarly, in India, the richest tenpercent now hold nearly 80% of the total wealth. For thesuper rich, the top 1%, the results are even morebreathtaking – they now account for nearly 3/5th of thecountry’s total wealth, about $1.8 trillion! The picture for theunderprivileged, however, is quite different and glaringlydismal. Thirty years ago, before the country opened up itseconomy, India accounted for about one-fifth of the world’spoorest. Today, close to one third of those, or about 400million, live in India.

Destructive Impact of the Elite Model

It’s not an accident that capitalism allows a small minority tocorner its largesse. C. Wright Mills, the American sociologistcoined the term ‘The Power Elite” in the 1950s to describethe nexus between the privileged group of Americancorporate, political and military elite and how they formedthe dominant fulcrum of that society. The electoral processwas undermined by big money, and access to high payingjobs became a factor of the neighborhood you grew up in,and consequently the schools and colleges you went to. As C.

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Wright Mills said, “People with advantages are loath tobelieve that they just happen to be people with advantages.”Variations of the power elite model became popular in thedeveloping world as international finance capital increasinglyshifted industrial production to the global south in the lastquarter of the 20 century, attracted mainly to the lowwages for labor and unrestrictive environmental and laborregulatory regimes. India fell into that swoop in the 90s andsince then a small minority has accrued all the benefits ofliberalization.

This elite rule has finally run the world aground, and it’ssobering to look at a recent NASA sponsored study tounderstand its destructive nature. An inter disciplinaryresearch project titled, the ‘Human And Nature Dynamical”(HANDY) model used mathematics and natural and socialsciences to study compelling historical data aboutinterrelated factors – population, agriculture, water andenergy usage and climate – to determine the sustainability ofthe modern civilization. Their conclusions were quite preciseand grim – “the global industrial civilization could collapse incoming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitationand increasingly unequal wealth distribution.” Two passagesfrom the study are quite striking:

“… accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughoutsociety, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass ofthe population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated asmall portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistencelevels.”

“Technological changes can raise the efficiency of resource use,but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumptionand the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policyeffects, the increases in consumption often compensate for theincreased efficiency of resource use.”

The inequality of resource usage, and the process ofresource allocation itself, are, both, rapidly propelling the

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world towards destruction. Ultimately, according to thestudy, the high rate of consumption among the elite will leadto the collapse of civilization. Not surprisingly, though, theelite themselves will be buffeted against that destructionlonger than the commoners, and yet their refusal to changewill make the collapse inevitable. What is interesting is thatthe methodology used for the HANDY study was inspired bythe ‘predator and prey model’, which is applied in themathematical analysis of ecosystems where “speciescompete, evolve and disperse simply for the purpose ofseeking resources to sustain their struggle for their veryexistence.” In the study, the researchers used the humanpopulation as the predator and nature was the prey. Thesymbolic relevance of that functional reality within the modelis quite telling. The power elite model has become apredatory system of intense exploitation of natureworldwide.

Nature and Capital

The perniciously dependent relationship between capital andnature was formed in the converging maelstrom of westerncolonialism and the industrial revolution, beginning in themiddle of the 18 century and taking off in the next hundredyears. Commons, which were hitherto shared by people,were being enclosed as part of private property forexploitation and extraction. Large spheres of life and socialprocesses, which had been untouched by the logic of profit,were beginning to get commodified by the market. Theserapid changes would lead to the stiffening of the distinctionbetween society and nature, a process initiated by Europeanpatriarchy with very specific ideas of what it meant to behuman. While male dominated societies had been a leadingfeature of Europe, patriarchy married well with nascentindustrial capitalism as the white male with his power overthe production process became the embodiment of thesociety and the rest of the world essentially got categorizedas nature to be exploited and subjugated. Maria Mies, the

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German eco-feminist described capitalism as “theappropriation of women, nature and the colonies.” Thosesentiments find an echo in American environmentalhistorian, Jason Moore’s recent book “Capitalism in the Webof Life” where he succinctly points out that, “capitalism is away of organizing nature.” The gradual consolidation of thatprocess of organization steadily opened up other perversedichotomies, which were built on the society/nature dualismand clearly characterized by the use of power, dominationand periodic violence by one over the other. In Moore’s ownwords, ”this idea of Nature and Society is very deeply rootedin other dualisms of the modern world: the capitalist and theworker, the West and the rest, men and women, white andblack, civilization and barbarism. All of these other dualismsreally find their taproots in the Nature/Society dualism.”

The Structures of Dominance and Exploitation

The contemporary socio-political structures through whichcapitalism operates are all closely related to that system’sdominance of nature and all the other entities that gotcorralled together with it – women, colored people, workers,developing countries/former colonies etc. The whitepatriarchal elite has been careful in keeping its classcontradictions within check by elevating the status of thewhite working class above that of the colored subordinates –offering them a psychological wage of superiority along withan added preference in medium and low wage employment,till recently that is. Now, capital, in its quest for endlessgrowth on a finite planet has begun bumping up against thenatural limits of the planet and that of nature itself. It cannotcontinue to enclose new “commons” for exploitation andextraction – fossil based energy sources are becoming scarceand prohibitively more expensive to extract, as are the othermineral resources, which have kept the capitalist machinemoving. Consequently, capital has had to off load peoplefrom the gravy train and cannot, now, continue to guaranteea sustainable superior role and livelihood to the white

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working class. The on-going political disaffection among thisgroup in the United States and its anger at the failure of thesystem to ensure their well being and preeminence hasresulted in new and unforeseen developments in theAmerican body-politic including the rise of the authoritarianfigure of Donald Trump.

The Rise Of Authoritarianism

Sustained attempts are underway, both, in India and theUnited States in disassembling the long establishedegalitarian tenets and promise enshrined in their respectiveconstitutions. A palpable socio-political power grab is afootat displacing the democratic order situated on institutionsand practices, and to replace it with the authority of a personor a group of people who would run the polity on the basisof a moral order underpinned by an ethno-religiousmajoritarian affinity. It’s increasingly apparent that theseefforts are now strengthening themselves since the arrivalon the political scene by President Trump as well as PrimeMinister Modi in India. Similar trends are evident in otherparts of the world, too. The Egyptian Spring, for instance,offered a glimpse of the people’s power but eventuallymuddled through the rule of an obscurantist religious partyto end up in the arms of an ex-army general. The ethno-religious upsurge in Eastern Europe is a cause of muchconcern regarding the fate of its shaky democratic structure.The clenching hold over power of the autocratic regimes inChina, Russia and North Korea shows no signs of slackening.Even in South America, popular progressive experimentshave come to a grinding halt, as ruling groups are unable tounshackle themselves from the hold of developmentalismand neo-extractivism on their imagination, or to overcomethe cult of personality driven transformation to figure outsocietal solutions. The betrayal of the revolutionary cause bySyriza in Greece is yet another example of how liberaldemocratic models are failing the people, as they ignore theneed to build political capacity amongst people at large,

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towards more radical democracy.

The rise of authoritarianism and the failure of liberaldemocracies are predicated on the inequality inherent in thecapitalist mode of development and its intensely destructiveimpact on the earth’s climate and environment.Neoliberalism is incapable of offering meaningful solutionsto the current global emergencies like climate change andacute wealth disparity. In fact, capital perpetuates thoseproblems for its own survival and to effectively retain acrucial hold on the power dynamic. Not surprisingly, then, inthe face of an assertive populace seeking remedies to theireconomic struggles and that to the worsening environmentalsituation around them, the ruling elite has devolved back tothe templates that have served it well in the past. The timetested psychological undervaluation of the “other” as seen incaste and race based discrimination in India and the UnitedStates or its violent manifestation in the rapidly increasingcases of lynching of Muslims and “untouchables” by Hindumobs in India, and police brutality against the blacks in theU.S., as well as the rise of proto-fascist white supremacistgroups are unambiguous displays of that societal powerdynamic. It’s not surprising that “lynching”, an Americaninvention for authoritarian subordination of the “other”, hastranslocated so seamlessly to India. The creation of asecond-class citizenry is essential for the appropriation of thediminishing resource base for the elite in both countries, andan authoritarian regime makes it easier and certain tofabricate the gradual cessation of the democraticexpectation of egalitarian access to resources.

The Search for Alternatives

There has to be a way out of this distressing and bleaksituation that we find ourselves in, and many attempts arebeing made all over the world in search of that path. Asdiscontent with the current economic, political,environmental and social dispensation, and its dodgystructures continues to grow, it is increasingly becoming

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clear that change will only come through collective actionand mobilization of people. Political resistance to climateapathy, exploitative capitalist overreach, patriarchy, racism,elite corruption, social inequality and authoritarian politics isgaining ground all over the world. Indigenous people all overthe world are organizing against the pressures of neo-extractivism. There are strong protests being organizedagainst the neoliberal structure of the G20 and WTO. Even inthe United States there is growing progressive resistance tothe Trump agenda. People are beginning to question thefundamental threat of the capitalist ideology, which hasconsolidated its hold based on patriarchy and other forms ofconcentration of power, to the very existence of the earth.But, given the consolidated and universal nature of thethreat that capital and neo-liberalism pose to the planet, aswell as the dexterity and suppleness of their physical andideological flow around the world, movements of resistancedo face a sneaky adversary to nail down.

While environmental, social and economic justicemovements are built around ethical ideas and principles andoften manage to extract significant concessions from theruling elites, they now have to think of and work towardsalternatives, which take the society on an ecologically secureand socio-economically egalitarian path, and away fromsocietal self-destruction. Many such attempts are takingplace all over the world. The pertinent question is, how manycountries have achieved development decades after thenotion of ‘development’ was spread around the world?Frankly, only a handful of countries can be called ‘developed’,others are merely struggling to emulate them, and all aredoing this at enormous ecological and social cost. Theinternational power elite has introduced new ideas like“green economy” to address this issue of the developmentlag and to enable economic growth and investment whileincreasing environmental quality and social inclusiveness. It’sa fig leaf of an idea, which diverts attention from theproblems of concentration of economic and political power

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in the hands of an elite, the wasteful dominance ofconsumerism on the popular psyche and the resourceintensive nature of the production process.

The genuine alternatives to the destructive juggernaut ofcorporate and finance capital are emerging as much fromcontemporary progressive resistance as it is from thewisdom of indigenous peoples’ and other traditionalcommunity world-views, which have survived the disastrouscolonial and imperial onslaught on their land as well asconsciousness over the last four centuries. This includesbuen vivir, a culture of life with different names and varietiesin various regions of South America; Ubuntu with itsemphasis on human mutuality in southern Africa and severalequivalents in other parts of the continent; Swaraj with afocus on self-reliance and self-governance, in India; andmany others. Borne out of the soil, the climate and thegeographical and environmental coordinates of a particulararea, these efforts, in fact, are the original ways of beingwhich are beckoning us to an ancient future of ecologicalresilience and democratic egalitarianism and multiple waysof knowing and being; importantly, many inequities inherentin traditional cultures are also being challenged in these re-assertions. They are complemented by more recentalternatives such as ecofeminism, ecosocialism, and degrowth,or recent reframing of old systems such as the commons andsolidarity economies, many of which question thedestructiveness of unilinear modernity. (Ashish is involved inbringing out a compilation of several dozen such alternativeworld-views from around the world, a Post-DevelopmentDictionary. He moderates a conversation with otherparticipants in this effort, elsewhere on the site).

Radical Ecological Democracy

“Radical Ecological Democracy” (RED) is one such emergingparadigm based on which we can fashion a meaningfulfuture. It has emerged from the grassroots experience ofcommunities and civil society practicing or conceiving of

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alternatives across the range of human endeavor in India(where it is becoming known as ‘eco-swaraj’ or ‘prakriticswaraj’), but has resonance in all other regions of the world.RED is a framework that respects the limits of the Earth andthe rights of other species, while pursuing the core values ofsocial justice and equity. With its strong democratic andegalitarian impulse, it seeks to empower every person to bea part of decision-making, and its holistic vision of humanwellbeing encompasses physical, material, socio-cultural,intellectual and spiritual dimensions. Rather than the stateand the corporation, it puts collectives and communities atthe center of governance and the economy, an approachthat is grounded in real-life initiatives across the world. TheRED approach recognizes that it is only one of a largediversity of such approaches, with some mentioned above,and does not seek to replace them or become an over-arching framework.

The RED approach rests on the following intersectingspheres: ecological wisdom and sustainability, economicdemocracy, social wellbeing and justice, direct politicaldemocracy, and cultural diversity. Fundamental to it is a setof values that include diversity, autonomy, cooperation andsolidarity, rights with responsibilities, equity and justice,inclusion, simplicity and sufficiency, respect for all life, non-violence, interconnectedness and dignity of labor. RED is anevolving approach, not a blueprint set in stone. In its veryprocess of democratic grassroots evolution, it forms analternative to top-down ideologies and formulations, even asit takes on board the relevant elements of such ideologies.

The Website

The RED website is an effort at exploring some of the ideas,practices, hopes and visions that can contribute to theevolution of our formulation of Radical EcologicalDemocracy. We would like REDWeb to become the hopefulhome for all the people thinking about, working towards andfighting for transformation, and of course not necessarily

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under that banner, but rather respectfully open to a diverserange of radical alternative paradigms and worldviews.

Here are a few thoughts about what REDweb would aspire tobe:

REDWeb should be a place for the expression oforiginal ideas through new articles – how are peoplethinking about climate change, environmental stresspoints, assertions for community and individualhuman rights, ecological politics, new powerdynamics, socio-cultural expressions through fictionand poetry and art, conceiving alternative ways ofstructuring the economy and polity, society andculture … towards fundamental, structural, systemictransformation.a venue for access to relevant news stories – what’shappening in the fields of research, grassrootsinitiatives, activism, public policy, legislation,economics and politics.a bulletin board for action oriented information –what kinds of struggles are taking place in variousparts of the world; what kinds of protests needsupport; where is there an immediate need forfinancial assistance; what are the forthcomingconferences, workshops, festivals, meets for people;what kinds of legislative initiatives are disastrousand need to be opposed; what are the places wherepeople have triumphed over corporate and politicalexigencies.an access point for information on indigenous,community, feminist, spiritual and other (old andnew) ways of being, worldviews, cosmologies, andwisdom that are radical alternatives to the currentlydominant system.a reference point for the old and new thoughts oneconomy, ecology, politics and society – from Marxto Gandhi to Ambedkar to Tagore to Arendt toGramsci to Schumacher to Luxemburg to Poulantzasto Bookchin to Carson to Illich to Ocalan to Marcosand a host of indigenous peoples’ and localcommunity voices.

With this agenda in mind and critically conscious of the

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submergence of the socio-political discourse under freemarket fundamentalism, patriarchy and statism, we haveinitiated the RED website to create a new synergy betweenmovements and the search for alternative ways of being, byfacilitating the possibility of learning from and shapingradical and revolutionary narratives.

In solidarity,

Ashish Kothari and Pallav Das

September 2017

Ashish Kothari and Pallav Das are co-founders ofKalpavriksh Environmental Action Group

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